LEE MILLER, IN PRIVATE From 1st June to 16th September 2007

PRESS CONFERENCE 31st May 2007, at 11.00 a.m.

INAUGURATION 31st May 2007, at 19.30 p.m.

Press contact: Manel Baena Phone: + 34 93 256 30 21 Fax: + 34 93 315 01 02 [email protected] CONTENTS

1. PRESENTATION

2. KEY ASPECTS OF THE EXHIBITION

3. EXHIBITION TOUR

4. EXHIBITION AREAS

5. «The Boy that bit Picasso» , son of and , director of Lee Miller Archives and The Penrose Collection

6. TEXT OF THE EXHIBITION CURATOR Katherine Slusher, «The Muse, the Minotaur and the Art Lover. Lee Miller, Picasso and Penrose» 1. PRESENTATION

Lee Miller, (USA 1907 - UK 1977) was a woman of many facets: a commercial photographer, news reporter, war correspondent, beautiful model and a Surrealist artist. During her Paris years she collaborated with . Miller was also a photographer who took over a thousand photographs of Picasso in the course of their thirty-six year friendship.

Miller and Picasso might well have met in Paris in 1929, where she lived with Man Ray or in 1930 when she had the lead role in Jean Cocteau’s movie, Le sang d’un poète. As chance would have it, it wasn’t until August 1937 that the audacious American photographer and finally met. Their enduring friendship began when Miller came to on the French Riviera with her lover Roland Penrose. During her stay in Mougins, Picasso painted six portraits of Miller dressed as an Arlésienne. Five of those paintings are on display in this exhibition.

This exhibition contains Miller’s exceptional and intimate work relating to Picasso. This group of photographs generally falls into two distinct categories, the first being her more artistic work, showing Picasso in his home or his studio. Some of these images have become so well-known as to be etched onto the popular imagination, even if few people are actually aware that it was Miller who took them. The second group are pictures she took specifically to accompany the work of her husband, Roland Penrose, on his visits to Picasso, as documentation of the many working sessions and meetings they had while he was writing his biography, Picasso: His Life and Work. This book, first published in 1958, is still considered essential reading. Miller’s photographs and Penrose’s texts comprise one of the most extraordinary portraits ever produced of an artist of the calibre and importance of Picasso. Miller was a multi-talented artist, or to put it in the words of her son and biographer Antony Penrose, ‘Lee Miller had many lives and many roles, and in all her roles she was her own bold self’. For this reason, we have decided to include a representative selection of her photographs including her involvement with the Surrealist movement and her fashion and commercial work and finally her work as a war correspondent and combat photographer. 2. KEY ASPECTS OF THE EXHIBITION

ƒ The is participating in the celebration of the centenary of the birth of Lee Miller (USA, 1907 – United Kingdom, 1977) with this exhibition, focusing on her professional relationship and friendship with Picasso

ƒ The exhibition offers an outstanding selection of the photographs she took of Picasso and of his artistic and private surroundings and, for the first time ever, will include five of the portraits that Picasso painted of Lee Miller dressed as an Arlesienne woman

ƒ A special section, dedicated to the close links dating from 1936 between Roland Penrose – Surrealist artist, Miller’s husband, and one of Picasso’s most important biographers – and Catalonia, completes the exhibition

ƒ There is also a full programme of activities planned:

- Seminar (13th June 2007), with the participation of Spanish and foreign experts around the life and work of Lee Miller, such as: Elisabeth Cowling, Mark Haworth-Booth, Estrella de Diego, Katherine Slusher and Antony Penrose - Lee Miller as seen by... (from June to September 2007), four different approaches to the life and works of Lee Miller during the exhibition, with the collaboration of Antony Penrose, Colita, Marc Recha and Pilar Bonet - Free guided tours to the exhibition (included in the price of the entrance ticket, prior booking required) for both individual visitors and groups

- Private workshops for students, in cooperation with the Design and Image Department of the Fine Arts Faculty of Barcelona University and with the photography school of the Catalonia Institute of Photographic Studies (IEFC) ƒ The Museu Picasso has been involved in the edition in Catalan of the documentary Lee Miller, a l'altra banda del mirall (or Lee Miller, on the other side of the mirror) directed by Sylvain Roumette ƒ The exhibition occupies the first floor of the Finestres palace and the Room 0 (ground floor) and is organised into 8 rooms:

- Room A: Lee Miller portrays Picasso - Room B: Picasso and the Penroses - Room C: Visiting Picasso - Room D: Picasso’s spaces - Room E: Legendary lives of Lee Miller (1907-1977) - Room F: Vintage prints - Room G: Picasso portrays Lee Miller - Room H: Roland Penrose & Catalonia

ƒ The exhibit houses 244 works:

- 164 photographs by Lee Miller - 18 photographs by Roland Penrose - 5 photographs by David Douglas Duncan - 5 oils by Picasso - 3 engravings by Picasso - 1 work by Antoni Tàpies - 47 documents - 1 Rolleiflex camera that belonged to Lee Miller

On loan from: the Lee Miller Archives, The Penrose Collection, the Musée Réattu (Arles) and from various private collections

ƒ The Room 0, situated on the ground floor of the Museu, has been converted into the projection room where, free of charge, the following films and documentaries can be seen, while the exhibition lasts: Space A

- The Surrealist & the Photographer, The Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, 2001, 17 min. V.O. subtitled in Catalan and Spanish, showed alternately

- Le sang du poète, Jean Cocteau, 1930, 50 min. V.O. in French subtitled in Catalan and Spanish, showed alternately

Space B

- Lee Miller through the Mirror, Sylvain Roumette, 1995, 55 min. Dubbed version alternately projected in Catalan and Spanish

- The lives of Lee Miller, Robin Lough, 1983, 59 min. V.O. subtitled in Catalan and Spanish, showed alternately Title: Lee Miller: Picasso in private Dates: From 1st June to 16th September 2007 Press conference: 31st May 2007, at 11.00 a.m. Inauguration: 31st May 2007, at 19.30 p.m. Place: Museu Picasso de Barcelona Montcada, 15 - 23 08003 Barcelona Phone (+34) 932 563 000 Fax (+34) 933 150 102 [email protected] Opening hours: Tuesday to Sunday (including public holidays): 10:00 a.m. to 8:00 p.m. Closed Mondays unless Bank Holidays. Last admittance to rooms 30 minutes before closing time Prices: Temporary exhibition: 5€ Package ticket (museum + temporary exhibition): 8,50 € Groups temporary exhibition: 4 € (booking required, groups of a minimum of 10 people) Grups Package ticket: 6,50 € Reduced Fee: exhibition 2’50€; package ticket: 5’50€: students up to 25, “carnet jove” holders, unemployed, retired, large family card holders (visitors must give proof of the alleged condition). Free Entrance: youngsters up to 16, aged people holders of “Targeta Rosa gratuïta”, ICOM members, teachers. (visitors must give proof of the alleged condition). Multiticket ARTICKETBCN: 20 €

Organisation: Museu Picasso de Barcelona, with the contribution of The Lee Miller Archives and The Penrose Collection Area: The exhibition occupies the first floor of the Palau Finestres and Zero room on ground floor. Its 1,000 m2 are divided into eight areas: - Room A: Lee Miller portrays Picasso - Room B: Picasso and the Penroses - Room C: Visiting Picasso - Room D: Picasso’s spaces - Room E: The legendary lives of Lee Miller - Room F: Vintage prints - Room G: Picasso portrays Lee Miller - Room H: Roland Penrose & Catalonia

Catalogue: Edited in catalan-english and spanish-english. Authors: Antony Penrose, Katherine Slusher, Elizabeth Cowling, Sònia Villegas. 200 pages with coloured illustrations. Editor: Museu Picasso (ICUB). Works: 164 photographs by Lee Miller, 18 photographs by Roland Penrose, 5 photographs by David Douglas Duncan, 5 oils of Picasso and 47 documents proceeding of The Lee Miller Archives & The Penrose Collection www.museupicasso.bcn.cat/leemiller Credits:

DIRECTOR: PEPE SERRA VILLALBA

CHIEF CURATOR: ACTIVITIES: SÒNIA VILLEGAS MARTA IGLÉSIAS

EXHIBITION CURATOR: CATALOGUE: KATHERINE SLUSHER MARTA JOVÉ

EXHIBITON COORDINATOR: WEBSITE: MONTSE TORRAS with the support of CONXA RODÀ ISABEL CENDOYA WEBSITE DESIGN: CONSERVATION: FERRAN VERDAGUER REYES JIMÉNEZ with the support of ANNA VÉLEZ SECURITY: JESÚS ALCANTARILLA COLLECTION CURATOR: MALÉN GUAL

REGISTER: EXHIBITION PRODUCTION: ANNA FÀBREGAS EXHIBITION DESIGN: ADMINISTRATION: LLUÍS PERA LLUÍS BAGUNYÀ and MERCÈ GABRIEL GRAPHIC DESIGN: IMAGE ARCHIVE: LALI ALMONACID MARGARITA FERRER GRAPHIC DESIGN OF THE COMUNICATION LIBRARY AND DOCUMENTATION: CAMPAIGN: MARGARIDA CORTADELLA OTTO & OLAF

PRESS AND COMMUNICATION: TRANSLATES: MANEL BAENA TARGET and XAVIER PÀMIES

* With the collaboration of: THE LEE MILLER ARCHIVES and THE PENROSE COLLECTION 3. EXHIBITION TOUR

Ground Floor

Room 0: projections of films and documentaries

First Floor

Room A: Lee Miller portrays Picasso Room B: Picasso and the Penroses Room C: Visiting Picasso Room D: Picasso’s spaces Room E: The legendary lives of Lee Miller (1907-1977) Room F: Vintage prints Room G: Picasso portrays Lee Miller Room H: Roland Penrose and Catalonia 4. EXHIBITION AREAS

A. Lee Miller portrays Picasso

Lee Miller photographed over a thousand images of Picasso during their long friendship. It is her longest running body of work and the photographs of Picasso have a more spontaneous air to them than much of her other oeuvre. Over the years, Miller continued to photograph Picasso in a wide range of circumstances and places.

Miller’s keen eye captured the ever-evolving Picasso in his many faceted existence as he changed from a contemplative artist at rest to a creator totally immersed in his work or again, to a social being surrounded by friends and family. In most of the photographs, Picasso exudes a magnetic energy that Lee Miller prodigiously captured through the eye of her lens, transmitting the artist’s vitality and the force of his presence. Sometimes Picasso literally sat for his portraits; there is a solemnity in his dignified and unflinching gaze that is reminiscent of classic portraiture.

In Miller’s own words, his flashing black eyes have fascinated everyone who has even only seen Picasso, but those who meet him feel thrown into an exciting new equilibrium by the personality of this small, warm, friendly man, whose name means modern painting.

B. Picasso and the Penroses

The first time Roland Penrose met Picasso was in the summer of 1936, when he was introduced by , who had become a close friend while organising the International Surrealist Exhibition in . A year later, Penrose purchased a painting directly from the artist – Nue sur la plage (1932). The friendship continued to grow and Penrose visited Picasso’s studio during the period he was working on his masterpiece .

Penrose wrote eighteen books on Picasso including originals and revisions, but the most important was the biography titled Picasso: His Life and Work (1958), not just because it was written with the express cooperation of the artist, but also because this book demonstrates how deeply and fully Penrose understood Picasso’s work. Penrose continued to dedicate much of his life to promoting and interpreting different facets of Picasso’s production.

The research for that book and subsequent publications required close contact with the artist. Lee Miller and Roland Penrose, often accompanied by their son Antony, visited Picasso and his extended family regularly both in Paris, and in the south of France (Vallauris, in , or at Nôtre-Dame-de-Vie in Mougins). Picasso visited the Penroses’ home at Farley Farm, in East once, when he was in England for the 1950 Peace Conference. Whilst photographing at Villa La Californie, Miller herself became the subject of David Douglas Duncan’s photographs, which are the only known record of her working with Picasso.

Roland Penrose was passionately loyal to Picasso, to his life and work, although their relationship was often not an easy one and rarely one between equals. In fact, Penrose’s fascination for Picasso was so intense that Miller defined herself on more than one occasion as a Picasso widow.

C. Visiting Picasso

Lee Miller’s photographs provide a vital testimony to Picasso’s life from 1937 to a few years before the artist’s death. These images portray small fragments of a life and a body of work that have marked twentieth century art history.

Miller’s photographs – both those taken to accompany the books written by her husband, Roland Penrose, and those she took for purely for herself – convey spontaneity, freshness and a feeling of intimacy.

Miller knew better than anyone else how to capture Picasso’s private side: the special atmosphere in his homes, his joy at meeting up with old comrades after the liberation of Paris or the natural, carefree days he spent on the beach with family, friends and lovers. Miller also photographed important studio visits such as the architects who commissioned Picasso to create a sculpture for the Chicago Civic Center or that of the art dealer Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler.

The numerous personalities captured in Miller’s photographs include Picasso’s close friend and loyal secretary Jaume Sabartés and the poet Paul Éluard, his companion through both conflict and pleasure. There are images of his friend Georges Braque, co- founder of the Cubist movement, as well as the writer Jean Cocteau and Gary Cooper. Of course the women in Picasso’s life are present as well, including , Françoise Gilot and Roque.

Seen here among his friends, Picasso’s affable face often disguises the resentment he felt about the many demands placed upon him by the stream of visitors who interrupted his work. On more than one occasion, he simply refused to receive the visits of many of his friends including the Penroses.

D. Picasso’s spaces

The photographs Lee Miller took of Picasso’s different studios offer a special insight into both the personality and the creative process of the great artist. These spaces are often packed with a myriad of objects that in Picasso’s hands could suddenly come alive and turn into works of art. The objects take on almost the same importance as the paintings and sculptures that occupy every corner of the studio.

Grands Augustins, Paris Picasso moved into the studio on the Rue des Grands Augustins in 1937, just a few months before he painted his masterpiece, Guernica. On the Liberation of Paris in 1944, Lee Miller went there to be reunited with Picasso and also with Paul and Nusch Éluard, , Elsa Triolet and other friends who had survived the Nazi Occupation.

Villa La Californie, Cannes In the summer of 1955, Picasso bought a light and airy villa called La Californie overlooking the Mediterranean where he painted the famous series, . The building’s unmistakable architecture is clearly identifiable in many of the artist’s works dating from the time he lived there. Later as new high-rise buildings were being constructed blocking out his sea view, Picasso decided to move out of the villa.

Nôtre-Dame-de-Vie, Mougins In 1961, Picasso moved to Nôtre-Dame-de-Vie, where he would live out the last years of his life. Situated in a solitary spot, far away from curious onlookers, Picasso was finally able to find the peace and privacy he needed to continue working intensely.

E. The legendary lives of Lee Miller, 1907-1977

The photographer Lee Miller was born in Poughkeepsie, New York in 1907. She entered the world of photography in 1927, when she was discovered by Conde Nast, the owner of Vogue magazine who commissioned her as a model.

Miller moved to Paris in 1929, where she came into contact with Man Ray, the Surrealist artist and photographer. She became his student, then his Surrealist model, muse, and ultimately lover. Together, they discovered the process of solarization. During this period Miller developed an acutely trained Surrealist eye which was to carry through all her subsequent work. In 1932, Miller returned to the United States and opened her own highly successful photographic studio. She excelled in advertising and portraiture. In 1934, she married the wealthy Egyptian businessman, Aziz Aloui Bey, and went to live in Cairo. On holiday in Paris in 1937, she met and fell in love with Roland Penrose. Later that summer, they visited Picasso for the first time.

With the threat of war in Europe, Miller left Egypt and joined Penrose in England. During the bombing of London, Miller photographed the destruction around her with a Surrealist sensibility while continuing her freelance fashion photography. Miller became a freelance war correspondent for Vogue accredited to the US Army. She created one of the most passionate testimonies of the Second World War through her photography and journalism which was published monthly in Vogue. Miller travelled all over Europe and was one of the first photojournalists to enter the concentration camps at Buchenwald and Dachau.

Lee Miller witnessed and photographed the worst side of humanity, but she also photographed some of the best. Her masterful and lucid portraits form a fascinating record of that time. Her images, including those shown here of Jean Cocteau, Joan Miró and Marlene Dietrich are among some of the finest portraiture of the 20th century.

F. Vintage prints

The vintage prints exhibited here were taken by Lee Miller and Roland Penrose over a period of twelve years. Miller inherited her father’s interest in the technical aspects of photography. She generally printed most of her own photos. Man Ray had been a demanding teacher and Miller became an excellent technician developing, fixing, washing and retouching her black and white prints. Miller used a Rolleiflex camera and a hand-held light metre during most of her career.

These vintage prints show the aesthetic choices made by the artist during the printing process: how the image is cropped, which areas are darkened or highlighted and the size of the photographic print.

The two larger prints shown here are particularly rich in textural quality. On this occasion Miller photographed Picasso with her son Antony in Vallauris. There was a bronze sculpture entitled Woman with a Key in the back yard of Picasso’s studio that he had based on a famous Cannes Madame. Picasso entertained Antony by placing a cigarette between her lips and thus bringing her to life. G. Picasso portrays Lee Miller

This room contains five of the six portraits that Pablo Picasso painted of Lee Miller in 1937, during the summer the artist spent in Mougins with Miller and Roland Penrose, Paul and Nusch Éluard, Man Ray and Ady Fidelin, and Joseph Bard, as well as his then lover, Dora Maar. Picasso depicts Lee in one or more characteristic elements of the typical Arlésienne costume, that is, wearing the checked bodysuit with the white cap and/or guidon (ribbons) in her hair. Although these are portraits painted from imagination, Lee’s physical appearance and personality are strongly evident, particularly when her large eyes and wide, smiling mouth are featured. The bright colours are also clear allusions to the photographer’s great vitality and creative energy, as well as reflecting the climate and landscape of sunny southern France. Moreover, the spiral and geometric motifs, the distorted forms and the markedly erotic air of these portraits are traits found in both primitivism and , two movements that greatly interested Picasso’s companions that summer.

One might say that Picasso revisits the Arlésiennes that Vincent Van Gogh had painted half a century before, imbuing his work with unusual violence as regards morphology and use of colour.

H. Roland Penrose and Catalonia, 1926-1984

While the name of Roland Penrose is intrinsically linked to Picasso, as his biographer and as one of the people who was most intimately connected to the artist, there is another lesser known aspect of Penrose’s life: his close bond with Catalonia and some of her artists.

Penrose initially visited Catalonia in 1926 with his first wife, the poet Valentine Boué. Years later, inspired by his meeting Picasso, and invited by the Generalitat, he returned to Barcelona in 1936, at the onset of the Spanish Civil War. One of the purposes of the trip was to refute the claim that the Republican forces were destroying works of art. The results were published in England the following year in a volume published by Christian Zervos, with Penrose contributing to a chapter titled Art and the Present Crisis in Catalonia.

During the Spanish Civil War, Penrose actively worked to help raise funds and create awareness in favour of the Republican cause. He organised a touring exhibition of Picasso’s Guernica around Great Britain, published various leaflets for the Surrealist Group in England, and helped organise an event to support refugee Basque children.

With the war over, Penrose maintained his links with Catalonia. The art dealer Joan Prats, who became a lifelong friend after his visit to Barcelona in 1936, introduced Penrose to Joan Miró and the photographer Joaquim Gomis. His circle of Catalan friends included the artists Antoni Tàpies and Joan Brossa as well as the architect Josep Lluís Sert. In addition to his famous Picasso biography, Penrose published important works about Miró (1970) and Tàpies (1978). He was also one of the founding trustees of the Fundació Miró in Barcelona, who dedicated an exhibition to him in 1981. 5. «The Boy That Bit Picasso» Antony Penrose

I don’t actually remember biting Picasso. I suppose I should be able to recall such an important event with absolute clarity, but no matter how much I meditate on the subject nothing comes to mind. I don’t even recall that he bit me right back and that I yelled like mad. All these momentous happenings were recorded for me by my mother Lee Miller. She left this information hidden in her Sussex home as part of a time capsule that documented most of her life. It was as if she knew that one day I would find her writings and photographs, her letters and her notebooks and piece her life together, and in so doing rediscover her as a parent and as the photographer and writer of distinction that she was.

It is true to say I knew her hardly at all during her life time. She suffered enormously from the effects of her war experiences, but I had no understanding of this. To me she was difficult, neurotic, often drunk and frequently absent on some journey with my father. I did not know that many of those journeys were the visits to Picasso where she took some of the best photographs of her career, continuing her friendship with him that we believe began in 1937 during an enchanted holiday in Mougins.

One day it may be that the technology arrives that will allow us to send e mails to people who are long dead. One of the first questions I will ask my mother is not if there is a heaven or a hell or if she has met any of the departed who we both loved but “When did you really first meet Picasso?”

Lee Miller was a significant figure in the modern art circles of Paris from 1929 to 1932. She lived with Man Ray and quickly and almost automatically became a Surrealist photographer in her own right. As such she knew , Paul Éluard, Jean Cocteau and many of the key figures of the time who were all strongly associated with Picasso, but there is no evidence to suggest she met him at this time. Could she have met him and just not talked about it?

Perhaps. She was good at keeping secrets but it is possible they simply did not meet. Similarly she did not meet my father Roland Penrose who was part of this same circle of Surrealist artists and poets. Roland and his first wife Valentine had been photographed by Man Ray and he was very close to Max Ernst but it seems as though he and Lee Miller needed to complete two huge loops in their individual journeys before they met.

Roland’s loop included ending his fourteen year domicile in France and returning to England where he curated the International Surrealist Exhibition in London in 1936. Later in the year he visited Barcelona in the company of his first wife Valentine before they parted and then divorced. During his time in this loop he made some of the most significant paintings and objects of his career.

The loop in Lee Miller’s life took her to New York and the success of her own studio there, followed by an impulsive marriage to Aziz Eloui Bey, an Egyptian businessman with whom she went to live in Cairo. She soon became bored with the sheltered and restricted life in the expatriate community, and made long range excursions with her camera to harvest the naturally occurring Surrealist images she readily found in the desert. Despite her many capricious affairs Aziz loved Lee steadfastly, and recognising that she pined for intellectual and cultural stimulation, he indulged her with an air ticket to Paris so she could visit her old friends. The night she arrived was the moment that the loops joined and she met Roland Penrose at the Rochas Ball. Man Ray, Éluard and Ernst were all there too, unknowing that any one of them could have introduced Lee to Roland five years earlier and closed the loop. The story would have then been vastly different to the one I have devoted so many years to mapping.

One of the many forces that had driven Roland outwards towards the excitement of presenting Surrealism in England, championing the Republican cause and meeting Picasso as he did in 1936 was his unhappiness with his marriage to Valentine. Life with this beautiful and mysterious poet had started well but the differences in their lives and personalities that had at first seemed exciting soured progressively and forced them apart. Unwittingly Valentine in her desire for a secluded life of meditation and contemplation had been the catalyst that prompted Roland to take the opposite path and forsake the life he had built up in France. His role as the ambassador of European Surrealism in Britain cemented his friendship with Éluard and thus laid the foundation for the moment in 1936 when Éluard introduced him to Picasso.

For Roland meeting Lee at the Rochas Ball Masqué induced what he later described as le coup de foudre. Here was his own version of the Surrealist dream woman incarnate – beautiful beyond belief, intelligent, creative and original with an acerbic wit that often took the form of a New York wisecrack. She was not the kind of Surrealist muse that was content to be admired and possessed. She asserted her own rights and determined her own path through life. She was an artist in the company of the front runners. Maybe these were some of the characteristics that made her so attractive to Picasso when they met in Mougins in 1937.

After le coup de foudre of the Rochas Ball Roland returned to England and invited Lee to come with him for a holiday in Cornwall. It was like a Surrealist Summer Camp, with Man Ray, his girlfriend Addy Fidelin, Max Ernst and , Paul and Nusch Éluard and Eileen Agar with her husband Joseph Bard. After three weeks they disbanded and drove across Europe to reconvene at the Hotel Vaste Horizon in Mougins. Picasso was there with Dora Maar. Over the next few weeks Picasso painted Lee Miller six times a l’Arlesienne. The traditional costume of the women of Arles accentuates the natural grace and loveliness they are well known for. Picasso was indeed complimenting Lee’s beauty by painting her in this way, but there was a counterpoint.

In 1869 Alphonse Daudet published a short story in his a regular series of Provençal tales titled Les Lettres de Mon Moulin. The story, based on fact, was titled L’Arlésienne and told of Jan, a young farm boy who was driven to madness and suicide by the cruel deceit of a beautiful woman from Arles. It seems Picasso seized on this as a cautionary tale about the dangers inherent in abandoning one’s self to the seductive power of beautiful women – a kind of warning against Andre Breton’s extolling of l’amour fou, the admired ‘mad love’ aspired to by the Surrealists. Perhaps it was in a gesture of even handedness that Picasso also painted Paul Éluard and Roland Penrose dressed a l’Arlésienne, but the fundamental difference in the portraits is that Lee’s are clearly recognisable as her. The huge gap toothed grin, the solar radiance of her warmth and the ebullience of her firm breasts are all captured in what my father described as mysteriously a most convincing likeness (which) was proved more than ten years later when I lifted our two year old son Tony in my arms to look at it for the first time. His instant cry of delight was “Mummy, Mummy.”1

I have no recollection of this event and in fact the portrait hanging in our home was later a source of embarrassment as my school friends teased me mercilessly about the weird appearance of my mother.

The six Arlésienne portraits Picasso painted of Lee are taken to be a clear indication that in that moment Lee and Picasso were lovers. All concerned believed that sharing partners strengthened friendships rather than threatened them. It was a brave ideal of that moment but one that could not be expected to survive into old age.

The next time Lee was to see Picasso was in 1939, during that period of twighlight in Europe, moments before World War 2 was declared. For the next five years all normal communication were severed, and it was not known if Picasso was alive, imprisoned or murdered. It was Lee in the uniform of a War Correspondent with the American Army

1 Scrap Book by Roland Penrose. Thames & Hudson London 1981, p. 109 (The Penrose Collection) who arrived at Picasso’s studio during the Liberation of Paris. He opened the door to her, and when he had overcome his amazement he hugged her tight, kissed her and pinched her bottom. “This is marvellous,” he cried, “the first allied soldier I should see, and it’s you!”

For Lee the post war years were a difficult time. As a photo-journalist she had witnessed the appalling atrocities of the Nazi death camps. All who saw these events were doomed to carry the images seared into their minds for the rest of their lives and Lee was no exception. She suffered from a condition that was barely understood at the time, but today we call it post traumatic stress syndrome and much can be done for those who suffer with it. For Lee, and millions like her there was nothing else to do but tough it out. She suffered from acute depression and alcohol abuse which she bravely tried to conceal so that when Picasso visited England in November 1950 it is unlikely he suspected anything was wrong.

Lee was the perfect hostess, knowing exactly what would please Picasso and accentuate the ‘Englishness’ of his surroundings. He had come to England for the communist inspired Peace Conference of November 1950 held in Sheffield which had been sabotaged by the British government. In the original draft for Vogue2 of an affectionate tribute for Picasso’s 70th birthday the following year Lee wrote;

Suddenly Picasso decided to return to Paris via our farm and the Newhaven ferry. He called on Lady Keynes (John Maynard Keynes’ widow) who was Lydia Lopokova in Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes. She kissed him and scolded him just like thirty years before and we took off into the country intending to shop for food and souvenirs along with sight-seeing as we went on. It was Wednesday and immediately outside London, town after town had its gloomy green curtains drawn for early closing. I was panicked like any hostess would be. T3he farm larder had already been cleaned out by our impromptu arrival of Picasso and his friends on the week-end. Shopping could wait until the next day but what for dinner? Brighton, our last hope is fortunately eccentric and was open … While Roland conducted a tour of the sights and interpreted a search for take-home presents, with ration cards clutched in my hand I bought a complete menu in tin cans from the grocer’s shelves …

At our farm in Sussex, Picasso found the world was very English; the landscape of downs with Constable clouds, the prudish Long Man of Wilmington, left-handed driving, red and white Ayrshires, open log fires, whisky and soda night cap, hot-water bottles, cooked breakfast and tea. A tinned plum pudding, holly-wreathed and flaming, was indeed English, very English, superb and quite unimaginable.

Not only can Picasso animate canvas, paper and bronze but everything in his orbit comes under a magic influence. The winter jasmine came in flower, the hateful stinging

2 British issue of Vogue magazine November 1951, p.112, 113, 160, & 165 with additional material edited from unpublished parts of the original m.s. (Lee Miller Archives) nettles disguised themselves with frills of hoar frost, even a great heap of trash and broken tiles produced a lovely form. The Tauro (Henry, our bull) pranced and preened like a chorus girl looking for a job. Heather, the large patient yellow nursery dog was so overcome with emotion that she messed on the grizzly bear skin in the guest room.

Our three-year-old son Tony was in ecstasy. Picasso and he became great friends, telling secrets, finding treasures of spider webs and seed pods, rough-housing, and looking at pictures. In Tony’s early vocabulary the words ‘picture’ and ‘Picasso’ were synonymous, I suppose because Roland and I referred to the same painting as ‘picture’ and ‘Picasso’ interchangeably and the words started the same. Later he realised that Picasso was a man, who like Daddy and himself made pictures. ‘Pictures’ include Craxton, Max Ernst, Klee, Braque. Although I don’t know which generic term he uses for them, naturalistic or whimsy illustrations and photographs are not ‘pictures’. Picasso and he agreed on this instantly, and illustrated books, particularly The Farmer’s Weekly, became tools to clarify misunderstandings in their mysterious mutual language. I’ve only recently realized that Picasso probably speaks a great deal more English than he admits. Only that, not magic, would account for the perfect accord and the whispered conversations.

You can’t have a rough-house in secret. Picasso and Tony pummelled each other amid squeals and roars. Each meeting, here and in France, added to the repertoire: giggling, ambushes from behind sofas, bellowing bulls, the olé, olé of approval. The crescendo of violence rose through ear-twisting and kicking to biting. Picasso bit back sharply […] ‘the biter bitten,’ and in the astounded silence which followed said, ‘Pensez! C’est le premier Anglais que j’ai jamais mordu!’ …

Reading these lines more than twenty five years later was the first time I learned of the momentous bite. I searched my body for a scar. If there had been one I would have been a work of art by Picasso, but nothing could be found. My memory of him from that first visit is much more vestigial. I recall he smelled wonderful – a combination of Gauloise cigarettes and a tangy cologne or perhaps scented soap. I recall his tweed jacket was scratchy and his Mediterranean warmth showed in the generosity of his hugs and cuddles.

The following year went en famille with my nanny Patsy to Vallauris to visit him. This was the occasion of the marriage of Paul and Éluard and Dominique Laure in St Tropez. Their ceremony occurred at the time of the Bravade, a festival that filled the streets with processions of people dressed in nineteenth century costume who fired ancient blunderbusses whilst others carried vast effigies of the saints. The festivities seemed to me to be an extension of the Éluard wedding celebration. Lee’s manuscript continues;

Tony is still within Picasso’s ambience. He tells perfectly true ‘tall’ stories about what he and Picasso did in St Tropez, about deep sea divers, processions with gunfire, and a flower vase Picasso gave as a wedding present to Paul Éluard … “taller than himself and covered with ladies with no clothes on who looked very happy.” He wears a beret and St Tropez sandals just like his hero, and his current excuse for all the odd behaviour is: “That’s the way they do it in France … just like Picasso.” He dunks his bread and insists on eating his ice-cream with his dish in his hand and his back to the table “Just like Picasso” … who had done just that, otherwise he would have missed the sights of the port and the procession of pretty girls. Sadly just over a year later Dominique became a widow when Paul Éluard died, leaving an immeasurable gap in my parent’s lives.

On one occasion I heard my father was going to Paris to visit Picasso, so I gave him my little toy London bus to give to Claude as a present. Claude was so pleased with his gift that he sent me one of his favourite toys in exchange, a small wooden figure of a motherly woman made by Picasso from a chip of scrap wood. She immediately was put in charge of my Noah’s Ark, a position of extreme responsibility which she retained until decades later when my own children started to play with the Noah’s Ark. To their disappointment Mrs Noah’s importance as a work of art was realised and she was relieved of her duty and went to live in a glass case.

My next was in 1954. His studio was in the disused scent factory in rue de Fournas, Vallauris and in the back yard stood a tall imposing figure of a woman cast in bronze. Picasso playfully inserted a cigarette between her lips, instantly bringing her to life. I thought she was just a “funny lady” and it was years later that I learned from my father she was modelled on a famous Cannes Madame. For me the people and animals he created had such vitality it was easy to confuse them with the real beings that were part of his life. Inside the studio a mass of junk filled every corner. Lee wrote; … Wherever he is, he lives an unbelievably simple life in the midst of an unbelievable chaos of possessions. … Masterpieces lie next to junk which in his hands will become other masterpieces. Old Iron, shards and bones await their moment of glory.

In the enormous rambling studios at Vallauris Picasso composed many sculptures from such ‘lost and founds’ which were then cast in bronze. Famous among these are The Crane, whose body plumage, made from a worn shovel, is surmounted by an elegant neck and head of gas fittings, and Ape with Young, hallucinating … the Ape’s proud maternal face is composed of a child’s toy motor car. … Proudly waiting to go off to the foundry were some ‘ladies’ in trim town clothes, complete with handbags, hats and high heels, while Picasso fondled and pretended to bottle-feed a small girl in a pram whose curly legs were clay tubes and bonnet a fancy pot.

The next visits were to Picasso’s new home in Villa la Californie. The vast house was overwhelmed by Picasso who paid no attention to its pretensions of grandeur and its ornate décor. He filled the rooms with treasures piled in long lines in a total chaos of African musical instruments, Polynesian sculptures, found objects of all sorts, his own ceramics, paintings and drawings and sculptures in profusion and the work of Claude and Paloma, his children by Francoise Gilot. “Has Picasso just moved in?” I asked Lee. “No, she replied, “he has been here quite a long time. Why do you ask?” “Well he hasn’t put his things away,” I said. She laughed and answered “That’s how he likes it.” From that momment my parents had no success in getting me to tidy my room. Other rooms were where he worked, and many variations of the face of his new love Jacqueline gazed at us from piles of canvases stacked all round the walls. A crazy lighting system with three naked bulbs on long metal arms provided illumination for his night time working. It failed when we were there, but Lee pulled some tools out of her camera bag and working under the anxious gaze of Roland and Picasso she swiftly fixed the wiring fault. Picasso was clearly impressed.

A huge sideboard was covered in masks, wigs and hats, and when we arrived there was often a sort of ‘ice-breaking’ ritual where we each chose our favourite disguise. Clowning around and playing were essential parts of life. There were many earnest conversations as Roland gathered material for his biography of Picasso but the sense of fun and the laughter were more prevalent. Roland was fond of recounting the time when an earnest person asked Picasso “What is the meaning of art?” After some moments of careful thought Picasso replied “I don’t know, and if I did I would not tell you.”

As a child I was allowed to roam freely, touch anything and when not playing with Claude and Paloma, play with the animals. There were always dogs, cats and caged birds many of which featured in Picasso’s work, but for me the most impressive pet was Esmeralda, a young female goat. By day she would be tethered in the garden, and by night or on wet days she slept in an old picture crate on the first floor outside Picasso’s bedroom door. As a farm boy this seemed the fulfilment of a dream. I had always been prevented from having the calves and piglets share my bedroom, and here was Picasso doing just that with his goat. There were more marvels in the bedroom itself. The tall French windows overlooking the Bay of Cannes were usually open so the doves that occupied the specially built nesting boxes on either side of the windows could fly in and out of the room. The furniture and the polished wooden floor were splattered with droppings. Another interesting priority, I thought.

It was during one of Roland’s visits in 1960 that Picasso asked after me. My father explained that I was unhappy as I had been sent to a special high pressure school to ensure I passed my exams. Picasso thought this was a terribly barbaric idea, and seeking to cheer me up sent Roland home with a delightful little drawing of a bull watching a dancer playing a pipe and a centaur. It has worked for me ever since.

More visits followed, and the last time I saw Picasso was after he had moved to Notre Dame de Vie in Mougins. Villa La Californie had been ringed in by tall buildings that blocked his precious view of the sea and allowed intrusive observation of the house. Notre Dame de Vie did not have the wonderful makeshift quality of La Californie but it was a beautiful secluded spot, and we could see Picasso was happy there.

By this time I had my first camera, and I was allowed to roam around making my childish snap shots of the things that interested me. I had been told that film was expensive so there are not many pictures, but those that did come out remind me I concentrated on the details such the canvases and drawings in the studio or the small army of maquettes scaling the steps, perhaps in search of food from the kitchen. More importantly there is a shot of Lee, Roland, Picasso and Jacqueline all looking at a small scrap of paper. They are relaxed and happy, obviously enjoying each other’s company. For me that represents the vital fusion of friendship and creativity that took place in the genuine warmth of the modest generous man who was the greatest artist of all time. For me this artless image carries the essence of what began with a bite and developed into one of the most treasured experiences of my life. Thank you, Picasso! 6. «The Muse, the Minotaur and the Art Lover. Lee Miller, Picasso and Penrose» Katherine Slusher

The relationship between Lee Miller, Picasso and Roland Penrose was a symbiotic one, created out of passion, poetry and practicality. The three were interlinked in such a way that equation would not have worked, or worked much differently and without fluidity if the chemistry of the triumvirate had not been present. This exhibition and catalogue examine that relationship in depth from the perspective of each one of them through their principal medium, be it photography, painting, or writing, as well as through the eyes of those who were present and provide a visual and written testimony of their experience. The greatest tribute to their relationship is by Picasso himself: exhibited here for the first time are the six portraits that he painted of his muse Lee Miller as l’Arlésienne that first summer the three of them were together in Mougins.

Lee Miller photographed over a thousand images of Picasso during the thirty-six years of their friendship. Miller’s photography, together with Roland Penrose’s writing, is one of the most extraordinary records ever made of an artist of Picasso’s calibre. Her keen eye captured the ever-evolving Picasso in his many- faceted existence as he changed from a contemplative artist at rest, to a completely self- absorbed creator at work, to a mythic minotaur at play, with family and friends, exuding a magnetic energy that Miller captured through her lens. Miller photographed him, following his steps, as Picasso wound his way through the labyrinth of life.

Roland Penrose, throughout his life, kept diaries, letters, scraps of paper with annotations and then later on, handwritten notebooks of each of his visits to see Picasso. Those, published together as a volume entitled Visiting Picasso, provide a priceless insight into the artist, his work, and his relationship with Penrose and others. It is significant that these notes were made at the time, due to that they have a freshness and immediacy to them which have not been distorted by memory’s filter. Penrose’s dedication to Picasso and making his work accessible through exhibitions and publications continued increasingly over the years. As Penrose himself wrote while organizing the Guernica exhibition, he had to “write God’s own quantities of letters, but for Picasso and Spain one can do a lot of things that would be impossible otherwise.”1 Among the other things that he did do, stimulated by his meeting Picasso, was travel to Barcelona in the midst of the Spanish Civil War to gather evidence to refute the claim that the Republican forces were destroying works of art. David Douglas Duncan, the renowned photographer, was present on more than one occasion while Lee Miller and Roland Penrose were visiting Picasso. His images of Lee Miller photographing Picasso are an unusual and priceless portrait of one photographer taken by another at work. He is what many of us have wished to be more than once in our lifetimes; the proverbial fly on the wall who observes and records from a distance, catching all the detail in his wide angle lens. The other person present was Antony, the only child of Lee Miller and Roland Penrose, who often accompanied his parents on their trips to see Picasso. His relationship was of a very different nature and intensity - that of a young child thrilled to meet a grown-up who was prepared to play and romp in an equally uninhibited way.

CONTACTS WITH SURREALISM In writing about people’s lives, history, and biography, there is what is known, and then there is what is assumed, surmised or projected on to them. What is known is that Picasso and Roland Penrose met in 1936 and this meeting centered around the first International Surrealists Exhibition held in London at the Burlington Galleries in June of that year. Until recently the exact circumstances of their first encounter were not altogether clear. Roland Penrose, along with , were the driving force and the organizers of this exhibition which was inspired and promoted by their contact with the French surrealists who actively took part in the exhibition. Picasso had eleven paintings exhibited there, and although not generally considered a surrealist, his work had a period in which he was closely linked to members of the group and their ideas and their explorations. He was sympathetic to their pushing the parameters of art in much the same way as he had done. Picasso did not attend the opening, but his inclusion in the show contributed to its enormous success. After the exhibition had closed, and due to Penrose’s increasingly close friendship with , he and his wife, the French poet, Valentine Boué, were invited to Mougins the following August to join Eluard and his wife Nusch. It was then that Penrose met Picasso for the first time. Others were summering there as well: among them were Dora Maar, who had recently begun her relationship with Picasso; Man Ray, the Surrealist artist closely linked to Lee Miller; and Christian and Yvonne Zervos, publishers of the Cahiers d’Art periodical and dedicated Picasso historians and connoisseurs. Lee Miller’s first introduction to Picasso is somewhat more of a mystery, what is known is that she met Picasso the following summer, in August, 1937, in the company of Penrose who was once again summering in Mougins. What is intriguing is that Lee Miller lived in Paris and had been very involved in the artist milieu there from from 1929

1 Letter dated November 11, 1938 from Roland Penrose in England to Lee Miller in Egypt through 1932. It seems possible that she could have encountered Picasso during those years, yet there is no evidence that she did. What is certain is that because of her relationship with Roland Penrose, whose first publication on Picasso was the landmark biography of 1958, she had continuous and long ranging contact with Picasso over a lengthy period of time. They visited him and his extended family with regularity, both in Paris and the south of France. Picasso even ventured abroad and visited them at their home in Farley Farm, East Sussex, England, in 1950.

Great art exists in museums, collections, and in their place of origin – the art studio – but without the scholar, the educator and the curator it would rarely reach a receptive and responsive audience. Penrose, whose faithful passion for the life and work of Picasso never abated, continued to organize exhibitions, graciously interceded on the behalf of museums in the United States and Europe as an intermediary for important commissions, and published extensively on the artist. Penrose’s role was essential in interpreting Picasso’s work and therefore making it accessible to a wide public. In reading Penrose’s insightful and masterful essay, The Beauty and the Monster, this once again becomes clear, not only just how important Penrose was in making Picasso accessible, but absolutely necessary as a key player in that process. Penrose penetrates deep beyond the surface of the man and the painter and provides a view into the inner workings of the artist with a coherent analysis of the driving forces behind his production. The dichotomy of beauty and the beast in Picasso, and in life, fascinated Penrose. It is a theme he kept coming back to his writing over the years: beauty vs. the opposite of beauty, whether it be called ugliness or horror. In analyzing that, Penrose went deep into Picasso’s primal attraction to many things that went against the current of what was conventionally considered beautiful, among them tribal or indigenous art. The principles of art were broken down in his Cubist paintings, Picasso was interested in the look of objects, but he took his interpretation or incorporation of it to another level. His capability of absorbing visual concepts and making them his own was one his remarkable qualities of an artist. His break with the classical canons of art was revolutionary. Whereas the surrealists were interested in what they thought of as the purity in African art, Picasso went past the surface and created the mixed emotions and different responses that it evoked in those who viewed it. As Picasso once famously said, he did not copy other artists, he assassinated them.

In the flux and flow of those active, vital years it is sometimes difficult to keep track of the ever changing relationships that inevitably fuelled the artwork being produced at the time. Picasso is an excellent example of that, his painting is often a reflection of his life and the world at large – his relationships with the women who inhabit his paintings in the primordial succession of pursuit, passion and disengagement, which often foretold a change of studio and abode whose arched windows, collected objects and spatial qualities populate his work in a parallel cycle of shifting companions and environments. The photographs of Miller provide a graphic testimony to his rich and varied life, her acutely trained Surrealist eye capturing the incongruencies, the silence, and the inner depths of the artist. The unexpected, the surprise element so loved by the Surrealists, is present in Picasso’s work. He was never held by the constraints and often rigid norms of any specific art movement, so he was free to move back and forth, upwards and downwards in his experimentation of the art medium without the constraints of a dogma to be adhered to, be it the Cubist multi-viewpoint perspective or the Surrealist search for the subconscious. Picasso had an immediacy to his work, it was based very much in the present, his life, and his visual reality. Picasso appreciated the Surrealists jolting the views of convention, yet dream states were not a part of a pictorial language that he chose to explore in depth. Nonetheless, there was a period of time when his affinity for them resounded in an exploration of the depths of primitive forms and the human psyche, the irrational and the intuitive.

John Golding, in his essay Picasso and Surrealism, sums up the artist’s involvement this way, “Picasso was one of the three major influences on the development of visual Surrealism…For its painters and writers he was a figure apart, a prophet who had pointed the way forward and whose miraculous powers of invention continued to be a source of inspiration even at the moments when they recognized that his path was not their own. In return, the admiration of a group of young artists unique in the annals of history for the intensity with which they sought to free the creative imagination provided Picasso with renewed stimulus; he enjoyed their company, particularly that of poets, allowed his work to be shown in the first major exhibition of Surrealist art, and agreed to the reproduction of his paintings in various Surrealist publications. 2 This connection of Picasso with Surrealism is an important one to establish as the movement defined and informed both Lee Miller and Roland Penrose’s oeuvre and interests more so than any other. In the late 1920s and early 1930s, prior to meeting, both Miller and Penrose had been involved in the burgeoning Surrealist Movement in Paris. Lee Miller was closely associated with Man Ray and 1930s’ Paris; as the muse, she was endlessly photographed by her then lover and mentor, Man Ray, in a variety of poses-- standing beside a window, her torso crosshatched by the shadows of a lace curtain, or in another image, her perfect profile enhanced by the solarization technique they discovered together. As a photographer, she explored her own visual language, experimenting and defining her style. There are traces of New Objectivity and in her Paris work from 1930. At the same time, she continued to explore the Surrealist world of mystery and nuance in her photographs. Roland Penrose, via his friend and artistic mentor, Max Ernst, was introduced to the group of French Surrealists and became an impassioned devotee. Max shared his artistic techniques of frottage, decalcomania, and collage with Penrose. He felt that Ernst had opened doors into a wonderful new world for him. Like Miller, it was in Paris that Penrose’s world expanded and took flight to hitherto uncharted directions.

LEE MILLER Elizabeth Miller (who changed her name to Lee at twenty) was born in 1907 in rural Poughkeepsie, New York. Her father, Theodore Miller, was a successful engineer and

2 John Golding, «Picasso and Surrealism», in Picasso in Retrospect. New York, Harper & Row, 1980, p. 50. her mother, Florence MacDonald, a Canadian, worked as a nurse before marrying. When Miller was seven years old her bucolic lifestyle came to an abrupt halt when she was raped; understandably the shocking event had lifelong consequences. She grew up, photographed and indulged by her father, while remaining a high-spirited prankster. She went to France at eighteen and convinced her parents to let her stay in the city to study art for the fall term. She rented a small room and enrolled in a progressive theater school and studied the applied arts of lighting, costume, and design as well as experimental drama. She revelled in her four months of freedom, exploring all the quartiers of Paris and living “ bohème.” The following spring, she returned to Poughkeepsie, and enrolled in the new drama program at neighboring Vassar College. Miller was in charge of lighting for several productions, but after her taste of freedom, she was anxious to escape. That fall, Miller enrolled at the Art Students League in New York City where she studied drawing. Miller soon realized she did not have the patience or obsession with painting to pursue the medium. At heart she was a rebel wanting to embrace life, not contemplate it quietly behind an easel in a studio.

Miller personified the glamorous look of the period and shortly before her twentieth birthday, she was discovered in dramatic circumstances when she stepped out into traffic on a busy street in Manhattan and was pulled back to safety by Condé Nast, the powerful editor of Vogue, the top fashion magazine of the period. Miller was soon on the cover of Vogue and she went on to be photographed by the elite in fashion photography of the era. Miller’s photogenic face and long, lean elegant body became a particular favorite of the photographer Edward Steichen. Her ever-enquiring mind and curiosity were not wasted in these sessions. She had grown up surrounded by and interested in her father’s photographic equipment and darkroom, and was now increasingly fascinated by the medium of photography and its artistic potential. At twenty-two, Miller returned to Paris and went directly to Man Ray’s studio in Montparnasse. She convinced him to take her as his student and apprentice and continued to work with him for four years. At the end of her personal and professional relationship with Man Ray, Miller returned to New York City and opened her own successful photographic studio. She excelled in portraiture and commercial work, but it came to an abrupt end when she accepted the marriage proposal from a wealthy Egyptian, Aziz Aloui Bey, whom she had met in Paris. In Egypt, she photographed her journeys into the desert as she explored isolated villages and the wide open barren spaces. In 1937, while still married and living in Egypt, she met and fell in love with Roland Penrose on a trip to France. At the start of the war in Europe, Miller moved to England and settled into a home in with Penrose. It was there that Miller supplemented her day job as a fashion photographer with her ironic and surrealistic view of the destruction that surrounded her during the bombing of London, which was later published in a volume entitled Grim Glory: Pictures of Britian under Fire. Miller convinced Vogue magazine to send her as a freelance contributor to cover the war, and thus began her work as a war correspondent and later as a combat photographer. She created one of the most gripping testimonies of World War II through both her images and her journalism. She photographed live combat and the siege of St. Malo just three weeks after D-Day. Miller moved across Europe with the 83rd Division and was among the first photojournalists to go into Buchenwald and Dachau concentration camps. She witnessed and photographed the worst side of humanity, but she also photographed some of the best. Her portraits are a fascinating record of the period and her images of the artists Joseph Cornell, Jean Cocteau, Joan Miró, Isamu Noguchi, , and the composer Igor Stravinsky remain among the finest in photographic portraiture of the 20th century.

PICASSO BY LEE MILLER Much has been written about the eyes of Picasso, invariably it is one of the first things photographers and writers mention about him when describing his presence. Their dark intensity often stopped the camera’s gaze, impenetrable like the masks he was so fond of wearing while at play. This can also be seen in his paintings, the consuming and dominating look of the eyes in mask-like faces; like many artists, Picasso was very much integrated in his work and each reflect traits of the other. The photographs that Lee Miller took of Picasso take on several different guises. There is a formal nineteenth century dated quality to his stance in many of his portraits. Picasso literally sat for his portrait; there is a solemnity in his unflinching and dignified gaze as he confronts the camera face on. Her Surrealist eye was always at play, from her earliest images in 1937 onwards, she used reflections in windows and mirrors to add an implied dimension to her works and the mystery of the unseen.(P1026) Her optical irony and humor in images that play with scale and size (P1078) also runs throughout her work . As a whole, the photographs of Picasso have a more spontaneous, documentary air to them then much of her other oeuvre, but it is also the longest running body of work she ever made. It is perhaps when immersed in work or involved in play with his concentration elsewhere that his vitality and presence is best felt in her images.

The facets of his personality that Miller captured covered a wide range, and that combined with all the different contexts and spaces that he inhabited over the years, gives an enormous breadth to her sum portrait of Picasso. She photographed him alone, with his lovers Dora Maar and Françoise Gilot, with her husband Roland Penrose and later their son Antony, during the War years, and with his second wife, . His children are present as well, Paulo, his son with Olga, Claude and Paloma, and his grandson Pablo.

Her fun loving spontaneous sense of humour connected well with Picasso’s incorrigible playfulness. A number of later photographs attest to this, particularly those in which they are both trying on masks, yet it is combined with an unerring eye that created images of great spontaneity while maintaining a psychological depth of vision into the person.

Miller was adroit at the art of capturing the essence of Picasso through the spaces he inhabited. Some of the most interesting portraits are often those which are not inhabited by physical presences. His studios, where he spent most of his waking hours, are omnipresent; the large chaotic rooms of Villa La Californie in Cannes, the hillsides and corners of Mas Notre-Dame-de-Vie in Vallauris, the elegant and stately spaces of the Château de Vauvenargues, and the informal warehouse of the Parisian studio on rue des Grands-Augustins. ROLAND PENROSE Roland Penrose was born in 1900 in , near London, into a strict Victorian family. Penrose’s father, James Doyle Penrose, was an Irish portrait painter who had studied at the Royal Academy in London His mother, Josephine Peckover, was the daughter of Lord Peckover, a wealthy Quaker banker. When he was a child, Penrose’s family moved to Oxhey Grange, northwest of London. After the First World War, Penrose left for Cambridge and enrolled at Queens’ College, where he met the economist John Maynard Keynes, whose splendid art collection contained the first Cubist works by Braque and Picasso that Penrose had ever seen, as well as paintings by Matisse and Cézanne. Through Keynes, Penrose was introduced to the insular world of the Bloomsbury Group, becoming particularly close with the art critic Roger Fry who organized the landmark exhibition on Post-Impressionism which was the precursor to Penrose’s survey of Surrealism years later.

BARCELONA AND SPANISH CIVIL WAR Penrose was from a Quaker family of ardent pacifists and yet he was a personal witness to three wars in his lifetime. He was active during the First and Second World Wars and his support of the Republican cause in the Spanish Civil War led him to Barcelona at a crucial time, the onset of the war. He travelled to Barcelona in October, 1936, invited by Jaume Miravitlles, the Comissari de Propaganda de la Generalitat de Catalunya. The correspondence around this trip comprised of the necessary letters of safe conduct for Roland Penrose and his first wife, Valentine Boué, to travel to Spain during wartime and various letters of introduction. Several different purposes for the trip are mentioned, in one of the earliest letters written by the Secretary of the Independent Labour Party in London, it states the following, “They are trustworthy Socialists and in conjunction with us are visiting Barcelona in order to assist Señor Castagnet to take a news film to win support for the workers’ struggle and to obtain material which will help us to arouse further support in this country”. 3 From there, the trail led to Paris, where the Information officer of the French delegation of the Generalitat de Catalunya in Paris wrote a letter of introduction which said, “Preguem tots els companys d’ajudar I facilitar el viatge al company I companya Penrose de Nacionalitat anglesa, ferm defensor del nostre movement de llibertat I justicia social. El company I la companya Penrose per la seva activitat mereixent d’esser acollits amb germanor per els companys que llegeixin aquests ratlles.”4 From there, the Penroses continued on to Barcelona where they are provided with further documents to safeguard their travels throughout Catalonia. In this letter, Miratvilles describes the purpose of Roland Penrose’s visit, “qual mission és documentar-se gràficament de les realitzacions económiques i socials, en fàbriques, tallers, etc. per tal de fer propaganda al nostre favor a Inglaterra per mitjà d’una exposició que en breu tindrà lloc a Londres” (whose mission is to make a graphic record of the social and economic reality in factories, workshops, etc. so as to show us in a positive light in an upcoming exhibition in London) and urging the recipients of this letter to “destaqui l’esperit noble i

3 Letter dated October 7, 1936 from A. Fenner Brockway, National Administrative Council, Independent Labour Party, London, from the Roland Penrose Papers, Dean Gallery, Edinburgh, Scotland. 4 Letter dated October 22, 1933 (should read 1936) from the Comissariat d’Informació a l’Estranger in Paris, from the Roland Penrose Papers, Dean Gallery, Edinburgh, Scotland. constructiu de la nostra revolució”.5 (emphasize the noble constructive spirit of our revolution) In the company of David Gascoyne, the young British writer on Surrealism and recent member of the Communist Party, they arrived in Barcelona where they met up with Christian Zervos, who was preparing an exhibition of Catalan art for the Jeu de Paume in Paris for the following spring. One of the main purposes of the trip was to look at the rich historic cultural patrimony throughout the region and verify that it was being protected by the Republican forces. Penrose was granted permission to visit museums, libraries, and academic institutions by the Generalitat’s Department of Culture.6 They stayed in Spain for over a month and were accompanied on many of their visits by Joan Prats who was very active in the artistic milieu in Barcelona years before opening his well-known and still active gallery in Barcelona. Penrose visited Romanesque chapels in the Pyrenees, the 12th century Tapís de la Creació in Girona, Pedralbes Monastery, Museu del Poble in Lleida, and many of the other extraordinary Romanesque and Gothic works throughout Catalonia. In Barcelona, he also paid a visit to Picasso’s mother and sister at the artist’s request. 7 At the end of November, Penrose received documentation to cross the Spanish border and giving him permission to leave the country with “uns reportatges molt interessants del nostre movement i porta documentació tal com: fotografies, articles, cartells, etc.”8 One of the outcomes of this visit was published in a large volume by Christian Zervos entitled Catalan Art – Architecture, sculpture, painting from the ninth to the fifteenth centuries in 1937. Penrose contributed to a chapter in it entitled “Art and the Present Crisis in Catalonia”. Zervos described the trip in Cahiers d’Art, upon their return from Catalonia, stating that church doors were being walled up to protect their contents, even in the most distant rural villages. Groups of artists, poets and musicians were working day and night at their own personal risk to protect the cultural patrimony by transporting large quantities of art works in the fifteen days following the war’s inception to the safety of the Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya in Barcelona. Zervos even described how two of the volunteers had been thought to be thieves and were shot as they transported the works.9

Roland Penrose’s visit reaffirmed both his commitment to Picasso and to the tragedy taking place with the Spanish Civil War. It was his most active political period and he helped raise consciousness of the situation in Spain via pamphlets, such as the Declaration on Spain, issued by the Surrealist Group in England in November, 1936 and the Artists’ International Congress and Exhibition in April 1937 again by the Surrealist Group. He was active in organizing fundraisers for the Republican cause in Spain, the Spanish Spain & Culture event at the Royal Albert Hall on June 24, 1937, was specifically for aid relief for Basque refugee children. The cover of the flyer has a drawing by Picasso dedicated to the mothers and children of Spain and inside a quote

5 Letter dated October 28, 1936, from Jaume Miravitlles, Comissari de Propaganda, Generalitat de Catalunya, from the Roland Penrose Papers, Dean Gallery, Edinburgh, Scotland. 6 Letter dated October 29, 1936, the sub-secretary of Culture, Conselleria de Cultura, Generalitat de Catalunya, from the Roland Penrose Papers, Dean Gallery, Edinburgh, Scotland. 7 Elizabeth Cowling, Visiting Picasso. London, Thames & Hudson, 2006, p. 27. 8 Letter dated November 25, 1936, from Jaume Miravitlles, Comissari de Propaganda, Generalitat de Catalunya, from the Roland Penrose Papers, Dean Gallery, Edinburgh, Scotland. 9 Christian Zervos, « À l’ombre de la guere », Cahiers d’Art, nº 8-10, 1936, pp. 213-216. from Goethe, “Science and Art belong to the whole world and the barriers of nationality vanish before them”. 10

PARIS: LEE MILLER, PICASSO, AND ROLAND PENROSE Lee Miller was the ideal bridge between Picasso and Penrose and the three are united indelibly in time. The day of June 21, 1937 was the most significant day for many reasons: it was the day that Penrose and Miller met for the first time. Penrose had gone with Max Ernst to a costume party at the home of the Rochas family, and it was there he was captivated by his first glimpse of Lee Miller. It was also the day that Penrose saw the completed Guernica for the first time. Penrose and Henry Miller had been there the previous month to see the work in progress and had met with many other artists, among them Max Ernst, Paul Eluard, André Breton, and Giacometti over lunch with Picasso. In its monumental scale, the colossal Guernica, was empowered by Picasso’s growing concern in the Spanish Civil War, his epic outpouring of anger, angst, and outrage covered canvas after canvas of the brutal forces of Fascism.

Four days later, Penrose was back in London and wrote his first love letter to Lee Miller, inviting her to spend the month of July with him and his houseguests at his brother’s house in Cornwall. From there, the house party moved on to the south of France, and all met up at the Hotel Vaste Horizon in Mougins. The group of friends that joined Picasso and Dora Maar that August included their Surrealist friends, Nusch and Paul Eluard, Man Ray, and Ady Fidelin. One of the landmark photographs of Surrealists at play, Picnic, Mougins, was taken by Lee Miller at the height of their glorious summer together, as well as lesser-known versions in which Roland Penrose holds the camera. They were there for almost a full month, from August 19 to September 17, and during that time, they enjoyed days of frolicking in the sea on the Côte d’Azur, good food and wine, and good-natured and ever-changing love trysts as they worked and played in equal measures.11

It was here in Mougins that Picasso painted six portraits of Miller as L’Arlésienne, his penetrating gaze capturing her gap-toothed grin and the slightly green tint in Miller’s blonde hair so that each of the six paintings show that as a defining trait. Each shows the same symmetry of features, a horizontal and a vertical eye, an ear in the form of eight, her wide grin, a triangular composition for the body with prominent, ebullient breasts for all to admire. Miller is sitting in the position that she preferred to be photographed in, in profile, her outspread arms in four of the portraits giving an expansive, dynamic sense to the paintings which as a group, create a masterful dance of geometry and color. Two of the portraits of Miller were painted the same day, September 2, and the energy, the light and vitality in them is palpable. Like the six portraits of Miller with green hair that Picasso painted that summer, he also made portraits of others in the group as Arlésienne; Nusch with her black curly hair is easily distinguishable. Less so are the gender bending portraits of Paul Eluard breastfeeding a cat and that thought to be of Roland Penrose, with his characterically slicked back dark hair also with feminine breasts.

10 Flyer, the Roland Penrose Papers, Dean Gallery, Edinburgh, Scotland. 11 E. Cowling, Visitng Picasso, p. 351. Penrose describes his visit to Picasso’s studio the day he bought one of the Arlésienne portraits of Miller to give to her,” In the afternoon I finally found Picasso and went with him and Dora to his studio. All the Mougins pictures were arranged round the walls with the exception of about half a dozen including my “portrait” which has already preceded me to America. As I thought my few words at Mougins had not been wasted and there was no difficulty in getting your “portrait” which I took away with me in triumph; there was no time to get a frame or get it sent off so I have got it with me and will profit of its marvels while I look round for a suitable frame in London. It will then take the boat to you darling the inspiratrice of so many chef d’oeuvres.”12

EGYPT-ENGLAND Penrose and Miller parted at the beginning of October, she went back to her life and her husband in Cairo, Egypt, and Penrose returned to Hampstead in London. Penrose’s letters reflect his ongoing concern for the war in Spain, he mentions it in his letters and even more striking, on the back of each love letter to Miller is a commemorative stamp in Catalan supporting the Republican cause. In November, Penrose gave her a description of what was going on, “You ask about Spain – the agony of these wretched people increases daily. It is not only your military and diplomats who are blind and cowardly. The government does nothing effective either to stop the Italian intervention or rescues the refugees from northern Spain where they are being massacred according to the most authentic accounts – men, women, children, priests and anyone who disagrees with Franco. Another British ship has been sunk by a rebel plane outside Barcelona; it was carrying grain and milk and had two non-intervention observers on board. In general the sky looks blacker than ever and with all the Italian and rebel troops free to turn on Madrid, now the papers are beginning to talk cheerfully of a complete victory of Franco’s Italians…Everyone talks of the possibility of war and the stock exchange blue funk, but there is no war fever to felt in the air and it is probably a long way off yet.”13

There correspondence continued, as did the war in Spain, and the next update on it from Penrose was the following, “The news from Spain is worse and worse, the places I visited the autumn before last are all being smashed to bits. I remember Lerida (Lleida) particularly well, where we were admirably entertained by the old colonel who is now putting up such a gallant defence – I can’t believe it is over yet all the same, those people can stand up to a lot.”14

Penrose described the success Guernica was having in London in a letter to Lee Miller, “Then there’s the Picasso exhibition which I arranged at Whitechapel….I had to make a speech at the opening after Attlee and members of the International Brigade - you can imagine I looked a bit out of place, but it’s all a tremendous success and they are making more money for food for Spain than we did in the West End.”15 It was indeed a

12 Letter October 6, 1937 from Roland Penrose in London to Lee Miller in Alexandria, Egypt, Lee Miller Archives. 13 Letter November 11, 1937 from Roland Penrose in London to Lee Miller in Egypt, Lee Miller Archives. 14 Letter April 2, 1938, from Roland Penrose in London to Lee Miller in Egypt, Lee Miller Archives. 15 Letter January 10, 1939, from Roland Penrose in London to Lee Miller in Egypt, Lee Miller Archives success, both in terms of numbers of visitors and funds raised; during the first week alone more than 15,000 people visited the exhibition and they raised two hundred and fifty pounds.16

PICASSO BY ROLAND PENROSE Penrose had forged an important and lasting friendship with Picasso, with his innate diplomacy and his friendly manner, allowing him entry into the artist’s homes, studios and private life. After the war, Penrose was faced with the choice of continuing his personal production as an artist or working to make the paintings of Picasso and other artists more accessible to the world. He chose the second option and organized first rate art exhibits as well as working steadily towards his dream of creating a museum dedicated to modern art in Britain. That led to the founding of the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) in London in 1947 and Penrose helped finance it by selling part of his personal art collection. In 1955, Penrose began writing his biography on Picasso, which was published three years later as Picasso: His Life and Work. As he explained years later in an interview: “Immediately after the war I got back (to Paris) and again our friendship grew, but I suppose it would have never become so intimate if I had not, to my great surprise, been asked by Gollancz to write a definitive life of Picasso…the first thing I thought was I will go and see Picasso and ask him what he thinks, which I did. I found him in the sea, at Collioure, swimming around, so I swam out to him. I said ‘Well, what do you think – somebody like me who has never written a book before in his life, and really hardly knows how to spell and they want me to write a book about you. Do you think I could do it?’ Picasso said, ‘Well I suppose there have been literally hundreds of books written about me. People have said what they thought. Why don’t you do the same thing and say what you think? I went and lived near him – I can’t say I ever interviewed him. One day I went to lunch there and there was just Jacqueline and himself at lunch, very friendly as usual. Jacqueline said to me ‘Now is your time. We are all alone at lunch together; ask him all the questions you want.’ I said, ‘Well, I find it very difficult to ask questions like that indeed, in fact I might easily ask the wrong question.’ To which Picasso said, ‘Yes, if you ask the wrong question, I shall give you the wrong answer.’ 17

Penrose relied on Miller’s unerring eye and her social skills and he respected her intelligence and instincts and he considered her an essential part of his new undertaking as Picasso’s biographer. At her best, she was fun and engaging and brought a spontaneity to what could otherwise be a forced situation. Miller was still suffering the effects of the war and her post war stress syndrome often caused her a great deal of anguish and depression, so what was better than reconnecting with Picasso and what he represented, her happier pre-war days.

Penrose not only asked the right questions for the Picasso biography, but wrote all together a total of eighteen books in their various editions on Picasso, including Penrose’s autobiography Scrapbook which is heavily laden with his involvement with

16 Gijs van Hensbergen, Guernica, p. 119. 17 Roland Penrose, Interview with Edward Lucie-Smith, BBC Radio 3, 14 October 1980, 22.00 pm, The Road is Wider than Long: Sir Roland Penrose at 80. the artist.18 There are also numerous catalogue essays, radio and press interviews, There were the obsessions and persistent themes that fascinated him in on the work of Picasso which he kept coming back to them over the years developing them further. During these academically fertile years for Penrose, he also wrote books on Joan Miró and Antoni Tàpies, monographs on postwar sculpture and catalogue essays on Max Ernst, Francis Bacon, and others. His genuine friendship and support of the artists he admired, believed in, and associated with had led him to begin an art collection that “collected itself” and became the backbone of the early 20th c. collections in the Gallery and Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art with works by Braque, Picasso, Ernst, de Chirico, Man Ray, Tanguy, Magritte and Giacometti. In recognition of his significant contributions to the arts, he was knighted in 1966, becoming, as he ironically put it, a “Sir Realist.” The ICA also continued to evolve and change as did Penrose’s involvement with it, and in 1968, it moved to larger premises in London.

BARCELONA 1970 Penrose continued his close association with Barcelona over the years, he was one of the founding board members of the Fundació Joan Miró and besides Miró, he stayed in close contact with the art dealer Joan Prats and the photographer Joaquim Gomis. His friendship with Gomis was significant; they were part of a group that, besides Miró and Prats, included the artists Antoni Tàpies, Joan Brossa and the architect Josep Lluis Sert. Alexandre Cirici described the most important project in common that they all shared, the founding of the Fundació Joan Miró in Barcelona and the balanced board of directors (patronat) which included, “quatre antics amics que havien viscut la gran aventura de la seva obra de joventut (dos Catalans, el Sert del GATCPAC, el Gomis de l’ADLAN, I dos estrangers: Penrose, el vell col.lecionista i promotor de l’Institut d’Art Contemporani de Londres, I Sweeney, que havia estat president de l’AICA i director dels museus Guggenheim i de Houston.”19 In a tribute to Prats published in a large volume by the Fundació Joan Miró in 1975, Penrose contributed a text to the publication describing their friendship which had endured for over thirty years in spite of the wars and great distances that usually separated them. The strength of their bond continued years after Prat’s death. The Galeria Joan Prat’s printing division, Polígrafa, in an unusual turn of events published Penrose’s autobiography in translation in Spanish before the Thames & Hudson original English version was published.

A year before Penrose’s death, a portfolio of graphic work was edited in tribute to Penrose, “Portfolio Homenatge a Penrose” with works by six artists, including what was certainly the last lithograph made by Penrose in 1983. Each print in the portfolio was given the name Homenatge a Penrose and it was comprised of an etching by Eduardo Chillida as well as and lithographs by , Antoni Tàpies, Zao Wou-Ki, and Penrose. His work contains the words ‘More Light’. It was the last cry of the dying Goethe and a phrase Penrose had used earlier when describing

18 For a complete list of Penrose’s writings on Picasso and translations of Picasso, see Appendix 3 in E. Cowling, Visiting Picasso, pp.398-399. 19 Serra d’Or, “La Fundació Miró obre les portes”, June 1975, Alexandre Cirici, pp. 79-82. Picasso. Now, on his way to join him, he integrated the artist into his own life and work one last time.